Josh Gorges

Josh Gorges' belated Christmas gift finally arrived on New Year's day, as the Canadiens' defenseman signed a six-year contract extension.

The deal will pay the Kelowna, British Columbia native $23.4 million, or an average of $3.9 million a year through the 2017-18 season. Gorges signs this deal after somewhat of a controversy over the summer, after Gorges and his agent, Kevin Epp, filed for arbitration only to sign a one-year deal worth $2.5 million mere days before the hearing.

While considered fair and deserved, Gorges' $2.5M salary was a significant increase over his $1.1M cap hit from his prior 3-ye...

The Pittsburgh Penguins and the Montreal Canadiens will both play their 24th games tonight. The season is over quarter of the way over. The newness of the season, the apprehension of how the new players will fit in and the tension of how each team will start is over. Now it’s time to honestly look at the team and see exactly where each stands.

I am sure you have heard this before but to start with we must remember that the Penguins have been without the league’s best player, Sidney Crosby, for most of the season. The Habs have been without Andrei Markov and a slew of secon...

The Coyotes have packed their bags and set off en route to San Jose, as tonight marks the start of a five-game road trip. They dropped their last contest against the Canadiens in overtime Thursday night, as a Josh Gorges slapshot found its way behind goaltender Mike Smith at the 1:45 mark of the extra frame. The Sharks, who took the last game against their division rival Coyotes by a score of 6-3, are 8-1-1 in their last ten games and sport the best shots-per-game ratio of the NHL with an average of 36.

San Jose is also stellar on the power play at home (30%, a league-best rating). That fateful home opener on October 8th saw the Sharks capitalize three tim...

In what can only be described as another week in Habs-land, the fans in this city have gone from having to be talked off the ledge, to pure elation, to a real glass cage of emotions that can't really be explained, in the process of no less than four days.

Backtrack to Monday night. The Canadiens had just lost their fifth game in a row, and were looking at one of, if not the worst start in the history of their organization. The Florida Panthers were hitting the Bell Centre ice, and the coaching and management staff was starting to feel the pressure around their necks. The end result? A 2-1 loss, thanks t...

While we weren't blessed with Brendan Shanahan's beautiful face in one of his suspension videos, the Shanhammer did offer his take on the hit, and why no suspension was handed down.

“We felt that this hit was the most challenging one so far in this preseason for the Department of Player Safety to evaluate. In the end, we felt that Malone had committed to the hit when Campoli was upright. However, when the contact was made, Campoli's head posit...

We were all wondering not if, but really when it was going to happen. By the looks of it, our fears have become realities, and likely much sooner than anyone had anticipated.

According to Hockey Inside/Out (via Tony Marinaro), Andrei Markov has suffered a setback in the rehabilitation of his knee. Word is that a few weeks back (likely long after Markov signed a new three-year contract with the Canadiens), Markov was diagnosed with water in his knee, the end result of training too hard, and had to have it drained while in the US. Moreover, at the annual Canadiens' golf tournament -- where Markov was sheltered from the media -- Pierre Gauthier h...

Over the last couple of weeks, we've been ranking and rating the players of the Montreal Canadiens. First, we looked at the top-six forwards before rating the lower-tier forwards, or, the best of the rest. The next logical step is, of course, the defense.

I toyed with the idea of presenting the defense rankings first this year, since, as we all know, coach Jacques Martin tends to go with a defense-first system. We may hate it more often than not, but in reality, that system has brought the Canadiens most of their success over the last couple of years. Of course, it's argua...

There was a bit of a surprised reaction in Habland yesterday when it was revealed that Josh Gorges and his agent, Kevin Epp, had decided to file for player-elected arbitration.

The news was especially surprising to me, as I had just got done posting a blog where I had mentioned that I thought the negotiation process with Gorges would be relatively simple, as the 26-year-old defenseman was one of only two skaters on the main roster that the team had left to sign, along with tough guy forward Ryan White.

To give you a bit of a backstory to the whole matter:

Gorges made $1.3 million in the last of a three-year deal that the Kelowna, BC na...

When Pierre Gauthier signed Erik Cole to a four year, $18 million contract on last Friday's free agent frenzy, I'm sure that both parties knew they wouldn't be introducing a stranger to the Montreal crowd.

In his ten-year NHL career, Cole has been known as lots of things, but in Montreal, he is simply known as a "Habs-killer".

The Oswego, New York native has played nine seasons in the NHL, mostly in Carolina, with a brief stint in Edmonton in 2008-09. In all those years, he's totaled 620 career NHL games, with 184 goals and 206 assists for a total of 390 points, with a +3 rating and 557 penalty minutes. His playoff totals include 6 goals and 8 assists...